


More Than Our Fables

by crescentmoontea



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Spoilers for Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), it all starts with a drink in the Wilting Rose, some Canon Dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27660922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crescentmoontea/pseuds/crescentmoontea
Summary: It was like a damn rite of passage, for Fraldarius men to throw their lives away for their legacies. Glenn was just precocious, going first, but he and their father alwayshadshared the same path. Always embraced their titles in a way Felix never did, picked up their blades not for strength or survival but for someone else’s future they wouldn’t live to see, for the bloodline they loved more than the prince who carried it.//Felix processes grief, love, and other terrible feelings. Set during the events of Azure Moon.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius
Comments: 12
Kudos: 50





	More Than Our Fables

This was a mistake.

Felix perched awkwardly on the edge of his chair, squirming as his father pitched a sad smile and a tarnished-pewter mug across their table. It was a bizarre sight: Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, stiff-lipped Faerghan knight, sitting ruler-straight and hypervigilant amongst the raucous patrons of the Wilting Rose. What was the old man thinking, asking Felix to meet _there_ of all places? If he wanted to talk war, or handle matters related to Fraldarius territory, the councilroom was unoccupied most evenings, as was the knights’ lounge and even his old damn classroom. Felix couldn’t think of anywhere worse to talk shop than a tavern in Abyss filled with the very rogues with whom they regularly crossed swords, whose rowdy laughter and carefree shouts spat in the face of the war raging aboveground. 

“Brown ale,” his father finally said, nodding as if _that_ was what Felix was waiting for him to clarify. “Your preference, if I recall.”

“I can buy my own drinks,” Felix snapped, stalking up to the toga-clad bartender and ordering a glass of red wine. He hated its sandpaper scrape across his tongue, but he hated the smug look on his father’s face more. How insufferably presumptuous, trying to curry Felix’s favor with a pilfered recollection of what he took with dinner the last time he visited home. 

But perhaps it was all he could muster. The old man looked tired: wavy hair tangled over his ears, purple crescents under his eyes like he’d spent the past few nights awake. Maybe insomnia ran in the Fraldarius blood, somewhere between the Crest and the foretold march towards war. Or maybe his father indulged the same ghosts that kept the boar awake. Felix heard them through the walls -- not the ghosts, of course, since he wasn’t _out of his damn mind_ , but he heard the boar, heard every garroted cry of _Father_ , of _Stepmother_ , of _Glenn_. Sometimes he whined them, high-pitched and pitiable, and sometimes he pulled them low from his throat, raked them across the stones of their shared wall, let them skitter like vermin across his floorboards until their echo filled Felix’s room, too. Felix hated them all, but if he were only able to rip one name from Dimitri’s tongue and spear it instead upon his blade, it would be Glenn’s--

“Lambert and I used to sneak down here, during our Academy days,” Rodrigue said as Felix sat back down, cutting through the cacophony and catching Felix’s attention. 

Felix didn’t want to listen, but he couldn’t deny how that image piqued his interest. His picture-of-nobility father and the then-future king, slumming it in Abyss under Lady Rhea’s nose? What a sight that must have been. Felix was almost impressed. 

Almost. 

“Oh?” he offered, and it was disgusting how quickly his father’s face perked up in response. Felix twisted a grimace across his face, but it was too late to have any effect. 

“Back in those days, nobles were often kidnapped if they were spotted down here,” his father said, eyes closing with nostalgia. “I can only imagine what the price would have been for a royal prince. But Lambert always wanted to come anyway. Said an ear to the ground of the common people was important. Although I always wondered if he didn’t just like going somewhere that no one recognized him.” 

Felix resisted the urge to nod. He might have accidentally offered his father an olive branch in the form of his curiosity, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to give him any further satisfaction. Were he willing to respond aloud, he might’ve said that he couldn’t imagine Dimitri pulling such a stunt -- certainly not the bizarre facsimile of Dimitri who’d shown up to the Officers’ Academy five years ago, anyway. That Dimitri could barely handle anything more than training and studying, he was so overtaxed by maintaining his contemptible princely mask: formal speech, mild mannerisms, thin, closed-lipped smiles meant to catch the beastly words he only let out at night, when no one but Felix and the ghosts could hear him. 

“We used to wear disguises,” Rodrigue continued. “Wrapped our hair underneath headscarves we stole from pirates in battle, and drank the cheapest pints on offer until we could barely climb the stairs back to the monastery. I learned more about Lambert in this very inn than I did in the first eighteen years of our lives. We were best friends before he was my king, before I was his shield.”

Felix scoffed into his goblet. “How nice for you, that your _king_ wasn’t a bloodthirsty beast.” 

“Neither is yours,” Rodrigue said with a sigh. 

Felix took the bait and downed the rest of his wine, let its raspy burn linger in his throat as he signalled for another awful glass. “Like hell he’s not. Some Shield of Faerghus you are, refusing to admit just what kind of rabid animal you’re protecting.” 

“Am I the one protecting him?” Rodrigue asked; Felix _hated_ the glint of recognition dancing in his father’s eyes as he spoke. “For all your blustering, Felix, you’re the one I always see in the cathedral, watching over him well into the night.”

“Someone has to,” Felix snapped. “Everyone else is too damn reckless with him. If he smells blood, he’s liable to run off and drown himself in it. He’s going to get us all killed if we aren’t careful. Is that what you want?” 

“Of course not,” Rodrigue said. “I want him to ascend the throne when this wretched war is won. It’s in our blood, Felix. Just as Kyphon swore his life to Loog, so too did I swear mine to Lambert. That means fighting for his legacy, even now. Even with Dimitri in this regrettable state.” 

Kyphon and Loog. Pathetic. Felix’s face flared hot against the cool air of Abyss; his hand reflexively tightened around the hilt of his sword. He couldn’t draw it, but he could squeeze it until his knuckles burst through his skin, until his nails dug gashes into its sealed wood, until the bones in his fingers cracked from the pressure in his grip. 

“This regrettable state,” he mimicked, swirling his drink until droplets splattered from its rim. “He’s a walking corpse. He said so himself. How can you want to see him in a crown when you won’t even look at what he’s become? What he’s always been?” 

Rodrigue took a hefty sip of his ale before folding his hands on the table. “But it’s also important not to let go of what he could still become, don’t you think? The path he could yet walk, the legacy he could yet reclaim? He needs our strength, Felix, not our ire.”

“What he _needs_ is a cage,” Felix spat. Something oily boiled in his chest as he forced the farcical words down his throat. 

_What he could still become._ Please. 

What good was a path he could yet walk if he wasn’t alive enough to seize it? Paths were carved for people and graves were dug for corpses, but so long as Dimitri was controlled by his ghosts, he was neither. Felix could neither grieve him nor embrace him, neither walk at his side nor let him go, neither own his feelings nor be freed from them--

“The way you look at him,” Rodrigue said. “Sometimes I wonder, despite everything you say--”

“I shouldn’t have come here,” Felix said, jerking his chair backward and standing, shuddering as he felled his last wretched sip of wine. 

“Felix,” Rodrigue called as he fled, but Felix ignored him. He knocked his knuckles against the dank walls of Abyss until they were pink with scrapes, until he could see the waning twilight at the top of the stairwell, and didn’t stop running until he was safely inside his quarters. 

Where did the old man get off, spewing such filth, reading into Felix's gazes like he knew a damn thing about what they caught? There was no _Dimitri_ to look at anymore, only the Boar Prince that possessed his leaden body, only the grotesque accretion of others’ blood that stained his flesh. Felix looked at Dimitri the only way he deserved: fully, completely, no blinking or squinting or softening his gaze. And he only trusted his own eyes: back when Cornelia announced Dimitri’s execution, Felix refused to buy it even as everyone else grieved. No proof, no death. For five years, in-between quashing skirmishes and bands of thieves, he’d followed fruitless leads across the whole of Faerghus. He told everyone who asked that Dimitri was better off dead even while falling to his knees every night, begging a goddess he didn’t believe in to bring Dimitri home. 

When the eve of the Blue Lions’ promise arrived, Felix marched from Fraldarius to Garreg Mach in silence, Dimitri’s name on his lips and a final drop of honeyed hope dissolving on his tongue. And for one shaky moment, when the Dimitri-shaped shadow stretched around the rubble on a beam of the sunrise, Felix believed in miracles. For all that Dimitri had been before he disappeared--a bloodthirsty boar, a two-faced liar, a kind-hearted friend and a noble prince--he was _alive_. Then he saw the way the shadow skulked, saw the way its shoulders hunched and its cape billowed, and prepared himself for the face he’d seen all those years ago at the uprising: the dead-eyed assassin who buried his enemies’ last screams in laughter. But even Felix hadn’t anticipated the creature that descended upon the class reunion, growling about rats and swinging a tarnished silver lance like it was the Death Knight’s scythe. 

He didn’t dare uncork Dimitri’s name from his mouth, not when all the boar offered upon questioning was a denial of his own humanity and his dead lapdog’s name, spit into the earth as an excuse for his continued presence. The rest of their former classmates chattered awkwardly, did their best to dodge the glare of his eye but found nothing but corpses upon which to land their averted gazes. 

Felix didn’t look away. Refused to look away. 

Since then, he’d sacrificed his own duties to babysit the boar: watching as he slashed his lance against piles of rubble, listening as he threatened the suit of armor in the training grounds. He never slept, he rarely ate, he refused to attend war council and he wouldn’t spar with anyone but his ghosts. But since Felix’s father arrived at Garreg Mach, and especially since Dedue turned up alive on the Great Bridge of Myrddin, something had changed. The boar had gone quiet. Snarls were replaced with groans, shouts were replaced with whispers. 

Perhaps Felix should have been happy, should have taken the shift as some sort of small victory. But it didn't matter how good the Boar Prince was at tricking everyone else with his stilted performances. He never fooled Felix. What good were softening sounds when his hands still reached for wraiths? Felix refused to take refuge in delusion, no matter how badly he _wanted_ to believe that somewhere inside that walking cadaver, his Dimitri was--

 _His_ Dimitri. 

Shit. 

He couldn’t think like that, not anymore. The old man must've gotten into his head, stirred up all the old, forbidden thoughts, all the dreams Felix used to have before the Tragedy carved up Dimitri’s soul and kept Glenn as a trophy. That was the last time Felix ever cried, burying his tears, his taste for sweets, and the future that hinged on Glenn being alive alongside his casket. Dimitri took up his new place next to Dedue; Felix took up Glenn’s caustic voice and set off on his own. Glenn had gotten a lot of things wrong while he was alive, but distancing himself from his emotions wasn’t one of them. It didn’t erase the pain, but it spread it thin through his muscles, dulled its thrum within his bones. He learned not to wallow and he learned to press forward, learned how to look at the boar without feeling anything, without wondering what could have been, without remembering all the days they’d spent together, all their dreamed-up shared tomorrows that would never come to pass--

“I know, Glenn,” Felix heard Dimitri say through the wall. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Felix picked up a vase from his windowsill and hurled it at the whisper, before collapsing on the bed in his clothes to try and sleep.

***

Two weeks later, they marched to Gronder Field, cut down their former classmates and came out the other side bloodied but alive. Felix kept close to Dimtri’s side until the enemy was routed. If he so much as blinked on even the sunniest day, he risked tripping over a pile of fresh corpses; goddess forbid the boar be left unsupervised under the cover of fog. Dimitri was safest when he was corralled, so Felix boxed him into the battlefield like a fence: one hand on his blade, the other ready to yank him back by his collar.

But vengeance sought Dimitri just as hard as he chased it. Death flowed behind him like a shadow: always at his heels and never at his throat, catching everyone else who dared approach him in its darkness instead.

Felix should’ve seen this coming. 

It was like a damn rite of passage, for Fraldarius men to throw their lives away for their legacies. Glenn was just precocious, going first, but he and their father always _had_ shared the same path. Always embraced their titles in a way Felix never did, picked up their blades not for strength or survival but for someone else’s future they wouldn’t live to see, for the bloodline they loved more than the prince who carried it. Was Felix so _wrong_ , to care more about Dimitri than the Blaiddyd legacy crushing his shoulders? To use his blade and not his body to keep the people he loved alive? 

How was he supposed to save anyone, when everyone in his life was determined to die? 

When Glenn was killed, only his armor made it home; Felix never saw his body. According to the boar, he died with regret scratched into his cheeks and a scream rotting on his tongue. But this time, Felix saw it happen. His father leapt between Dimitri and his fate without raising his shield, spearing his own life on the blade meant to slaughter the beast--

 _He died like a true knight._

Felix fought the urge to vomit. 

Sylvain gasped. Ingrid screamed. Dimitri begged, sucked Rodrigue’s dying breath into his selfish lungs and cradled him in his arms. Felix froze, watched the scene unfold through a gauzy haze as his pulse lost its gallop and his hands lost their grip on his sword. He wanted to surge forward, rip his father from Dimitri’s grasp if only he could _move_ , wanted to send him sprawling upon the ground so his soul could sink before Dimitri could steal it. 

How _dare_ the boar claim another life for his garland of ghosts? How dare he snap off another piece of Felix’s broken family, like he was entitled to their flesh while claiming not to even be worthy of his own?

“Felix.” Sylvain’s hand landed on his shoulder and Felix jolted. He didn’t like being touched unless it was during a brawl, and Sylvain knew it: not when Glenn had to hold him down to clean his skinned knees, and not when Ingrid tried to hug him at Glenn’s funeral. 

The only person who used to be able to touch him was Dimitri. They were inseparable once, both in presence and in the twining of their small hands. Even as a kid, Felix kept one hand on his sword, but he always let Dimitri take the other, always let him run a pace ahead and pull him towards the day's adventure. Felix never cared where they went. He would’ve gone--did go--anywhere Dimitri wanted, whether it was the mucky sludge of a swollen river, the top of a lilting tree -- or a rising insurrection in Western Faerghus. 

_They must pay for their sins_ , he’d said, fifteen years old and already weighed down by the chains of the dead. _Come with me, Felix. Act as my squire._

And like a damn fool, Felix agreed, sheathed his sword and marched at his side, even as the sharp undertone of Dimitri’s voice sliced at his ears, as dread simmered in his stomach and Dimitri’s eyes went crazed and hungry as soon as the skirmish came into view--

“Felix,” Sylvain repeated, withdrawing his hand but setting his voice down roughly across Felix’s back. 

Felix turned to face him, and whatever Sylvain saw in his gaze must’ve scared him. His eyes widened, his mouth twitched, his hands curled at his sides. “I’m so sorry,” he continued, pity marring his face. “Rodrigue was--”

“Stop,” Felix said, biting off whatever gutless comfort Sylvain was trying to offer and spitting it into the grass. 

“I’m sorry,” he said again, missing the glare Felix fired as his gaze dropped to the ground. “I can--” he motioned to his horse with one skittering palm, “--back to the monastery, I mean.”

Felix filled in the blanks. _I can ferry your father’s body._

He forced a curt nod to accept the offer--goddess forbid the boar tried to bring him back on foot--and watched as Sylvain approached Dimitri, knelt at his side and murmured the plan. Dimitri nodded, disconcertingly pliant, and allowed Sylvain to scoop the old man’s limp body from his lap. 

Felix would never, ever say this out loud, but sometimes Sylvain reminded him of Glenn. Not the Glenn who lashed barbed wire from his tongue, or the one who stood solemn and composed the first time he donned the Aegis shield, but the Glenn who never hesitated to swallow his own pain and take charge when everyone got hurt. The Glenn who bit back his own tears to help a sobbing Felix pick flowers to lay on their mother’s casket: a memory so small and faded it was almost gone, but Felix recognized the same saltwater shine in Sylvain’s eyes as he carried Rodrigue. He hoisted him onto his horse and launched himself into the stirrups, turned his head and flicked the reins without so much as a backwards glance. Ingrid followed overhead on her pegasus, and Felix remembered all the days she’d spent locked in her room after Glenn's funeral. Glenn was Felix’s brother, but he was Ingrid’s future; she took on his knightly dreams like Felix took on his mannerisms, like Dimitri absorbed the trauma of his final moments--

“Your Highness,” Dedue said, stepping towards Dimitri from somewhere past the convoy. “Allow me to accompany you back to the monastery. We must get you somewhere safe.”

Dimitri looked past Dedue, fixing his gaze on Felix instead. His eye was swollen from a hit on the battlefield, and as he opened his mouth, Felix swore he saw his own name taking shape on Dimitri’s lips. 

“Don’t you dare,” he snapped, unwilling--unable--to hear it; Dimitri recoiled like he’d been slapped, sighed and closed his mouth, turning his head like someone was speaking from the empty space at his side.

How quickly could the boar conjure his ghosts? Was his father already there, clasping at Dimitri’s shoulder opposite Dedue, whispering in his ear? Ridiculous. Dimitri had already stolen his dying words; what more could the old man possibly have to say? His father didn’t thirst for revenge. He wouldn’t fit in with Dimitri’s lamenting menagerie. Then again, Lambert hadn’t been a bloodthirsty king, but Dimitri’s incorporeal copy of him did nothing but shriek for severed heads. Felix supposed the Tragedy of Duscur changed everyone who survived it; maybe the same was true for its dead. Or maybe their demands weren’t theirs at all, just the skull-crunching psychoses of a man possessed, the gnarled figments of Dimitri’s bloodthirsty imagination. 

Felix marched the whole way back to the monastery alone. He crunched patches of moss under his boots and kept his eyes on the boar’s back. He did _not_ wish for Dimitri to break from his lockstep with Dedue, was _not_ disappointed when Dimitri didn’t look back--

***

It took a week for Professor Manuela to prepare Rodrigue’s body for burial, and in that time, the unthinkable happened. 

Dimitri apologized to the army. 

_Apologized_. For his _behavior_. Like his rampages and his lies and his bloody fucking murders had been some kind of an _inconvenience_ instead of a crisis. Everyone else had the gall to smile, and when Felix spoke out of turn, snapping and asking how he intended to repent, Dimitri doubled down, said Felix’s name in an awful warbling tone and tried to claim that all he had were words. It was horseshit. Felix knew it, Dimitri knew it, and everyone else in the war council would’ve known it if they weren’t so damn desperate to pretend things were going back to normal. As if there was a normal to which anyone could return. But Felix bit his tongue for the rest of the meeting, leaving perplexed, incensed, and--mostly, honestly--scared. Hope bloomed in his belly like wildflowers after a storm, and he wanted nothing more than to yank it up by its roots and crush it. 

It was a terrible thing, hope -- a simpering trick, the song of a siren concealing a sword behind its hips. It was unlike Felix to let such a despicable farce as _hope_ sink its claws into his ribs, cling to his skin and sully his shadow with its glimmer. And yet Felix couldn’t help but search Dimitri’s face every time they passed one another, track his movements every time they sparred, press his ear against their shared wall every night and listen for the telltale whispers to his ghosts. He even tried to interrogate Dimitri, catching him in the training grounds and lashing out in a way that would’ve baited the boar into a lance-first lunge, would’ve baited the prince into locking his words behind another cracked-plate smile. But the Dimitri who responded did neither; instead, he sparred, had Felix verbally pinned by the end of the conversation, drew startlingly honest admissions from Felix’s lips and noticed far more than Felix admitted aloud. 

_Deep down, more than anyone, you--_

It was awful; it was exhilarating. It left Felix feeling sliced open, raw and shaken -- and it was nothing but another performance. It had to be. Because if not that, what? Divine intervention? Or--Felix almost retched at the thought--was this the old man’s doing? Had his death truly managed to coax some of Dimitri’s bludgeoned empathy from his tipped-inkwell soul? Horrific. Leave it to the old man to _choose_ not to rest until the Boar Prince donned his damn crown. To whisper his theories about Felix’s damn _feelings_ into the boar’s eager ears. 

Everyone else was certain the change was both truthful and permanent. They offered Dimitri back their trust even though he’d put only a single damn week of effort into earning it. Felix was incensed, and refused to do the same. No matter that he wished for it more than anyone in the monastery; no matter how his hastened fate as the incoming Duke Fraldarius demanded it like a token of fealty. Felix was never supposed to become the duke, was never meant to sit at the future king’s right hand or take up his father’s old moniker. It was supposed to be Glenn, and Felix had never been jealous of his inheritance. 

Because what Felix wanted wasn’t a title, wasn’t prestige or lineage, repentance or revenge. All he’d ever wanted was to protect the _people_ he loved. He loved Sylvain like the older brother he’d lost, he loved Ingrid like the older sister she was supposed to have become, and most of all, he loved Dimitri like the knights in Glenn’s books loved the princesses they saved. Dimitri wasn’t a princess and Felix wasn’t a knight, but that never stopped the fantasies of whisking him away from the snowy bleakness of Faerghus, away from the fables that haunted their bloodlines. At his weakest, he still indulged in fantasies of the future that died with their innocence, but at his strongest, he dreamed of one built from nothing but their own blades, in which they could become something more than their legacies preordained. 

So it was for that future that Felix vowed to refuse every last one of Dimitri’s _almosts_ , to refuse his performances and actionless apologies, because to accept them would be tantamount to giving up. Felix was about to bury his father; he refused to bury anyone else he loved. 

There was no goddess-damned way he was going to let Dimitri go.

***

Gustave agreed to chisel the gravestone they stole from the church’s stores; Professor Byleth identified an empty plot in the cemetery they could dig up and use. Felix insisted the burial not turn into a spectacle, so Sylvain and Ingrid banned everyone except Dimitri from showing up, but as evening gave way to nightfall, Felix wondered if the ghosts had talked him out of coming, too. 

Sylvain kicked stray pebbles into the waiting grave; Ingrid said _he’ll be here_ to no one in particular several times in a row. Felix crouched, balancing on his toes, at his father’s side, trying and failing to remember how to cry. Tears used to flow like rivers from his eyes at the slightest bump or bruise, but it had been so long since he’d indulged the urge, his wells had run dry. But there was so much pressure building up behind his forehead he felt it might burst, years of unparsed grief digging into the backs of his eyeballs--

“I apologize for my tardiness,” Dimitri said as he came up behind Felix. 

Felix said nothing, seething as that ugly word-- _apologize_ \--once again throttled Dimitri’s austere voice. Ingrid accepted the offering instead, and the four turned as one to face the grave. This was nothing like Glenn’s funeral. There was no polished mahogany casket, no flower-sprays dotting a grand sepulchre, no order of knights to serve as pallbearers -- just a simple muslin sheath, a bouquet of flowers clipped from the greenhouse, and Dimitri and Felix, carrying Rodrigue on their shoulders and lowering him down to rest. Ingrid offered some quiet words that Felix couldn’t hear over the air rushing in his ears, while Sylvain swallowed the visible lump in his throat and sent the first shovelful of dirt into the grave. As it fell, Felix knelt and closed his eyes: couldn’t pray, couldn’t speak, couldn’t watch. 

When the ground was smoothed, and the stone was set, and the lanterns lit for the walk back to their quarters, Felix stayed behind. 

“I need a minute with my-- I need a minute,” he said, the words coming up rough from his throat. They nodded in unison, spun around and walked in one wide line up the staircase. Felix watched them leave, Dimitri last to disappear into the darkness, before turning back to his father’s grave. 

“So,” he said. “I bet you’d tell me you knew this was coming. Knew you weren’t going home.”

His father, obviously, did not respond. The dead were dead; the old man wasn’t hanging around a tombstone that didn’t even yet bear his name. 

“Don’t misunderstand,” Felix said, shoving both hands in his pockets, “it’s only because I know you’re not here that I’m talking to you now. I’m not the boar. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

For reasons he couldn’t fully comprehend, he waited a moment before continuing. 

“Is that why you met with me, before we marched to Gronder?” he clutched his sword as his hands started shaking. “I should’ve realized. You’re too damn pious, just like Gustave. You’d rather endlessly repent for burning a bridge than put in the work to build a new one. Makes me sick.”

Far away, something splashed in the pond, but the graveyard was silent. 

Felix huffed, took a few deep breaths, and admitted the real reason he was talking to a ghost.

“You were right, by the way,” he admitted. “About how I look at Dimitri. Maybe you knew me better than I thought you did. I guess I hope you knew that.” 

His voice caught in his throat as a hand landed on his back. Felix recognized it immediately, should have wrenched himself away -- but his tired, selfish body leaned into it instead, sagged against that famous Blaiddyd strength until Dimitri opened his mouth.

“Felix,” he said, and that was all it took for Felix to leap away, jagged breath slicing through his lungs as he bolted up the stairs away from the cemetery, racing in the darkness towards the staircase to their quarters. 

Dimitri caught up to him at the foot of the bridge; Felix should have charged for the steps, but he backed instead onto the pitch-black bridge, leaned against its ropes and let them dig into his shoulderblades. The moonlight cast shadows across Dimitri’s face, filled his blue eye with silver and his straw-blond hair with ash. 

“You must already know,” Dimitri said, taking step after careful step towards Felix, alarmingly quiet and gentle for his hulking frame. “I’ve always-- I still-- I’m so sorry.” 

Felix felt a hot flush of anger flare across his face. Another empty apology. More talk. Felix already knew the boar could _talk_. He knew it better than anyone in the damn monastery, was the only one who’d listened to all the nonsense he’d spouted without plugging up his ears. What good were words without a track record of meaning them? They were just weapons, his pretty words, shaped like dreams but aimed like arrows at his chest. He wanted nothing more than to silence that lying mouth with his own, but he refused to yield to yet another _I’m sorry_. 

“Enough,” Felix hissed. “I told you already. I want you to--” 

“--speak through my actions. So you’ve said,” Dimitri said. “And I will, Felix. I swear it.” 

The words shuddered up Felix’s spine, sent him spinning back to the shadows where he’d watched Dimitri fall apart. _I will have her head. I swear it_ , snarled over and over: the training grounds, the cathedral, the Holy Tomb all stained with the echoes of that vow. 

“Don’t talk to me like one of your damn ghosts!” Felix shouted, rocking backwards on his heels. “They’re dead. I’m not. I’m right here. I’ve always _been_ right here.”

Dimitri stepped even closer--were Felix to have lost his footing, his forehead would've knocked into Dimitri’s chin--before speaking again. “You have,” he said. “It’s me that I’m never sure about. If I’m really here or not. But I always felt your eyes on me. Saw you following me around, gripping your sword just like you’re doing now.”

Felix didn’t remember grabbing hold of his sword, but he let go as though its handle was hot and grasped for the ropes of the bridge instead. “So what? Someone had to watch you.”

“No, Felix. No one had to. But you did anyway.” Dimitri shifted his stance, stared at Felix’s hands instead of his face. “All these years you’ve been begging me to be honest, and I haven’t listened. Extending your hand, but I haven’t taken it. After what you’ve gone through--what you’ve lost, and what I’ve done--anyone else would have given up on me.”

 _I will never give up on you_ , Felix refused to say, because if he let those words escape, everything else he was holding back would tumble out behind them: all the _I miss yous_ and _where are yous_ , the _please come backs_ and _I love yous_ he’d swallowed and caged in his gut. The last thing he needed was to spill all his secrets off the sides of the bridge. The last thing he needed was Dimitri’s face looking so sad, so loving, so damn _familiar_. It was naive to believe that things could be different--

But was what he wanted actually _different_? Felix had never asked Dimitri to change, just demanded he stop acting like words alone could atone for actions. Mouths could lie and faces could be shielded by masks, but actions were nothing if not honest. Felix's own actions were a testament to that. The places he stood, the positions he took on the battlefield, the glances he refused to withdraw even when the sights hurt his eyes all screamed Dimitri’s name again and again, even as his mouth refused to so much as spit it--

“I have no right to ask you for your hand again,” Dimitri continued, reaching out and brushing Felix’s knuckles with his fingertips, lighting them ablaze. “But I will extend mine, and hope that there will come a day when you can take it in kind.” 

“More words,” Felix pushed back, but weakly. “And what will you want from me then? I’m not Glenn. I’m not my father. I refuse to be your knight.”

“I am selfish. I will want what I’ve wanted for as long as I can recall,” Dimitri said, even and solemn. “Goodnight, Felix.” 

He turned without another word, walking towards the training grounds without looking back. 

Felix stood on the bridge as the wind picked up, brought his burning knuckles to his mouth, and bit. 

***

Felix was surrounded.

Ingrid and Sylvain had him cornered in the stables, brushing out a horse's mane as Felix scrubbed down its messy stall, doing their best impression of Byleth droning on for hours back in the damn Officers' Academy. 

“It’s been a month," Sylvain said. "Just tell us what happened.”

Felix glared, barely resisting the urge to kick over a nearby bucket of water. “Nothing happened.”

“Nice try. Something happened,” Ingrid said, shaking her head as she pulled a sugar cube from her pocket. “I saw His Highness double back to the cemetery after we split up. The whole floor heard your door slam when you got back that night. And you’ve been acting extremely weird around him ever since.”

“I have not been acting weird.”

“Oh, really? Your insistence on serving as Flayn’s adjutant when we fought Cornelia wasn’t weird? Dancers don’t need adjutants, Felix, not to mention you’ve never willingly offered to be anyone’s adjutant before.” Ingrid narrowed her eyes and leaned towards Felix. 

Sylvain smirked. “I suppose it’s just a coincidence how often Flayn dances for Dimitri?”

Felix said nothing; his incorrigible friends continued their tirade like he’d already admitted his guilt. 

“And what was it the whole dining hall heard you shout, when Professor Byleth forced you to join them for lunch?" Ingrid asked. 

"Time for you to shut up and eat now,” Sylvain gleefully supplied. "Then you told him to enjoy the meal, which might've been the weirdest part."

“I didn’t shout.” Felix glared again. “Stall’s done.” 

Ingrid led the horse back inside without taking her eyes off Felix. “You absolutely shouted. What did His Highness even say to prompt such a rebuke?”

 _You used to whine unless you could do everything with me_ , Felix refused to repeat. “Nothing. Are we done here?” 

Ingrid sighed. "I suppose," she said.

"But we'll get it out of you eventually," Sylvain threatened through a smile. 

Felix left before they could say anything else.

He supposed part of Dimitri’s twisted definition of atoning through his actions was treating each of his _words_ like actions, too. It was a noble enough idea, except it meant that he went around saying things that made Felix’s pulse skip and his temper flare, with no consideration for where he was or how they could be taken. Nonsense like how he was glad to be at Felix’s side whenever the professor paired them on chores, or pointedly asking for Felix’s opinion during every damn war council meeting, or teasing him like during that ill-fated meal. It was too much, too fast, and it was making Felix’s head spin. 

The logical thing would have been to avoid Dimitri, but Felix didn’t have that option. It was exactly as he’d overheard Dedue remark to the professor: _if you take your eyes off that man for one second, he’s liable to do something rash._ Felix was both glad that someone else understood and enraged that the person who did was the boy who’d replaced him all those years ago. Dedue, who knew of Dimitri’s madness even before Felix did but never pushed back against it; Dedue who was too traumatized by the flames in his own eyes to question their reflection in Dimitri’s. Jealousy punched a path through Felix’s heartbeat. He knew that having Dedue around kept Dimitri tethered to his resolve in a way only a saved life could, and he _knew_ that he owed Dedue nearly as much gratitude as he did Gustave and his father for Dimitri’s continued breath--

“Felix Fraldarius?” A messenger, buckling under the weight of an overwide wooden-planked box, caught up to him alongside the pond. 

“I am. Who’s asking?” Felix eyed the familiar crest adorning the side of the box. His family’s coat of arms. Unexpected.

“This box was found among the late Duke Fraldarius’s possessions,” the messenger said. “The acting duke sent it for express delivery. Do you accept?”

Felix nodded, took the box from the man’s hands, and hoisted it over his shoulders. It was heavy, and clanged as he walked. Weapons, probably. Weapons made sense. His father had already passed him the Sword of Moralta between licks of flame at Ailell, but collecting swords was one of the few hobbies they'd shared. Felix remembered tugging on his father’s sleeve as they strolled bustling markets, pointing out the details for which Rodrigue had trained him to look: serrated teeth and intricate carvings for works of Zoltan, the glint of arcane crystals within swords imbued by magic. 

But when he emptied its contents onto the floor of his quarters, he was surprised to find only a few blades nestled beneath stacks and stacks of books. Faerghan history books, strategy books of all kinds, a book of the Fraldarius lineage, and a leather-bound tome Felix lost his breath as he lifted. 

It was lighter than he remembered: when Glenn used to hold it, and Felix used to reach up from his lap to cradle the corner of its binding, it felt heavy as a whetstone. In reality, the book was downright light, but its pages were as yellowed as Felix remembered, corners creased and printing faded, lines Felix was certain he could still recite by heart marked with messy underlines.

 _Are you jealous?_ Glenn once asked, after finishing the final chapter for probably the fiftieth time. _When we grow up, Dimitri’s going to be Loog, and I’m going to be Kyphon. His sworn friend, his sword and his shield._

_I don’t want to be Kyphon_ , Felix remembered saying. _And I don’t want Dimitri to be Loog, either._

_Why not?_ Glenn had asked, ruffling Felix’s hair just roughly enough to scrape his scalp. _You don’t want him to become the king?_

 _I don’t care if he’s king_ , Felix said through a sniffle, tiny hands balled into fists against Glenn’s legs. _I want him to stay Dimitri, and I don’t want you to take him away from me._

Glenn had actually _laughed_ at that, the bastard, a deep belly laugh that shook his whole body hard enough that Felix had to climb out of his lap. Felix hadn’t thought of his laughter in almost a decade, but as he knelt on the floor and held the old book, he heard them.

So for the second--and, he swore, final--time in his life, Felix opened his mouth to talk to a ghost. 

“You turned out to be Kyphon after all. I suppose you’d like to gloat about that,” he said. “Maybe I should blame you for how he’s suffered since then. Maybe until now, I did. I told Dimitri to stop stringing gravestones around his neck, but it’s me who wears yours like a shell on my back.”

Glenn, of course, said nothing. The dead were dead, the living were living, and Felix wasn’t talking to any restless spirit but his own. Even so, something about setting the words free anyway made his body feel lighter, made determination tense in his muscles, stretching taut like rope as he stood. 

“Father left his ascension to the throne in my hands. And I will see it through,” he said, the finality of the promise foreign on his tongue. “But not as another Kyphon. Not as anything in any of your books. The vow I want to swear to him isn’t one of friendship.”

With that, Felix left his father’s relics scattered on the ground, left Glenn’s book tucked in the drawer of his desk, and climbed the staircase to the monastery’s third floor. He’d never actually been up there before, but during their chat in the Wilting Rose, his father had called the Star Terrace his favorite spot in all of Garreg Mach. Said he liked to go up there to think; Felix certainly had a lot to think about. 

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one. 

Dimitri stood over the terrace’s small pond, holding his heavy fur cape in his hands. It was impossible for such a large man to look _small_ , but he looked -- young, maybe. Young like his twenty-three years suggested on paper, young like the war so rarely allowed him to seem. His face was scarred, blossomed with loss and burdened with kindness; for the first time since the tragedy, Felix recognized him. 

“How did you find me?” Dimitri asked without turning his head. 

“I wasn’t trying to,” Felix said. “My father told me about this place.”

Dimitri offered a little half-smile to his reflection in the water, still refusing to look at Felix. “Rodrigue told me about it as well. My thoughts are quite loud today, but it’s peaceful here.”

Silence settled in the space between them; Felix decided against filling it. He was ready to talk, but only if Dimitri was ready to act. He crossed the terrace in a few long strides, pressed his elbows into its guardrail and took in the sight of the town below. The late-afternoon sun held steady over the horizon, sending beams of light bending over the rooftops like monks in prayer. Felix closed his eyes and let the warmth soak into his skin, took breath after slow breath until his heartbeat tempered. 

When he opened his eyes again, Dimitri was there, standing at his side with his head tilted sideways, gaze resting on Felix’s forehead.

“Stop staring at me,” Felix snapped, uninvited heat dusting the tops of his ears.

Dimitri obeyed, turning his head towards the horizon instead. “What do you see, when you look down?”

“Is this a trick question?” Felix asked; Dimitri’s alarmingly earnest expression confirmed it was not. “I see the pond. The houses. The wyverns in the sky and the mountains in the distance.”

“I see that too,” Dimitri said. “Today, anyway. But sometimes all I see are the flames of Duscur, and I cannot blink them away no matter how I try. Sometimes I smell smoke when nothing is burning, or feel the gritty water of the gutters on my tongue, even when my cup is clean. I have chosen to serve the people and not the dead, but that doesn’t mean their voices have left me. Not completely.”

Felix reached for Dimitri’s hand before he could think better of it. 

He unwrapped Dimitri’s fingers from the railing, one by one, and laced them instead between his own. Dimitri’s lips parted in surprise, but Felix didn’t back down, staring with all the intensity he’d stockpiled for a decade. He hated eye contact, but he hated the thought of Dimitri misunderstanding him more; after all, he owed Dimitri the same honesty he demanded. Nothing more, nothing less. 

“Never hide your face from me again,” he said, circling a scar on Dimitri’s knuckle with his thumb. “Got it? The only thing I’ll ever ask of you is honesty. I won’t listen to any more lies.” 

“Felix,” Dimitri murmured. It was a fractured sound, as broken as it was hopeful. “I understand. And I want nothing more than to have you at my side. But with all that you’ve suffered, I can’t ask you to stay with me--”

“Shut _up_ ,” Felix said, defiance biting through his wince. “I thought you knew me better than that. I love you, Dimitri, I’m not just going to _leave_.”

He froze, stared at his words as they hovered in the air, watched as Dimitri’s cheeks darkened under a flush--

And then Dimitri was _smiling_ through his severity, tugging on Felix’s hand and pulling him closer, tilting his chin up and cradling his jaw--

“I love you, too,” Dimitri said, thumb brushing over Felix’s lower lip before kissing him, before setting them both free for the very first time. It was all that Felix wanted and nothing like he’d imagined: strong and generous, playful and somber, loving in his ferocity and overwhelming in his candor. They kissed until Felix’s back was against the railing, until Dimitri’s hands were tangled in his hair and his neck bore a trail of red marks from Felix’s teeth. 

“My Felix,” he murmured, pulling back just enough to stripe the words against Felix’s cheek. 

Felix opened his mouth like a reflex to say something coarse, but Dimitri kissed him again before he could. _His_ Dimitri. More than the binary of man and beast, of Boar Prince and King of Lions. Felix didn’t worship crowns and he refused to submit to legacies, but he loved everything Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd was, with everything he would ever be. And when someday, someone wrote fables about his life, Felix swore they would be nothing like the ones in Glenn’s books. Damn the chivalry of Kyphon and Loog, the martyred fealty of Fraldarius and Blaiddyd -- the throne that awaited Dimitri was the one he’d clawed from the clutches of his ghosts, the one from which he’d honor the dead, while never again bending Areadbhar to their will.

Felix would make damn sure of it.


End file.
